Welcome to these pelvic floor stretches for pelvic pain and pelvic floor muscle spasm for
beginners. Hi, my name is Michelle. And today I'm going to guide you through four exercises
and these are including stretching exercises for your pelvic floor muscles and also for relieving
the muscles that get tight with pelvic pain and pelvic floor muscle spasm. Now,
it's really important that you keep the exercises within your level of
comfortable tolerance and if you experience any discomfort, I'd like you to cease the
exercises straight away. These are all based on the ground, which is why I'm on the ground,
or you can do them lying on the bed at home as well. So let's get started.
So let's go through our starting position. First of all, going to be lying down, this is the most
relaxed position for the pelvic floor. So this is an ideal position for doing your pelvic floor
relaxation. You can see I've got the two cushions side by side there and I'm going to just position
them under my thighs so my legs can be slightly apart, and in that position, just lying down. So,
what you can do in starting that is just lying down in this position, with your legs just rotated
out with slight knees rotated outwards and feet rotated outwards in that position. So this is
our relaxation position. In this position, we're going to start with some diaphragmatic breathing
exercises. So these breathing exercises involve breathing into your belly to start relaxing your
pelvic floor. It's really important to do these exercises these diaphragmatic breathing exercises
with the stretches we're going to go through. So what you do to breathe into your diaphragm
is place one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly, and I want you to breathe in slowly and
deeply and as you do so your belly should rise and fall. So let's do that together. Take a nice deep,
slow breath, preferably through your nose if you can, right into the belly, allow it to rise,
and then just allow the air to fall away slowly. Now this top hand shouldn't move,
this hand that's over your chest, just the hand that's over your belly. So let's do that again.
This time breathing in deeply into the belly, and this time into the pelvic floor right down deep.
Feel your belly expand and rise with the in-breath and let the air fall away.
Alright, let's move now into our first stretch. Now the first which we're going to do is called
a butterfly stretch. You might have seen this done before, I'm going to show you how to do this
exercise for your pelvic floor and to stretch the pelvic floor along with some modifications. So,
your starting position is lying down. What I'd like you to do is to slide one leg up. Okay,
so I'm going to start with one leg at a time, then you can slide the other leg up. Now the
butterfly stretch is the butterfly position with the legs open, and you take your knees
apart as far as it feels comfortable. However, with pelvic spasm, sometimes it might be really
tight or uncomfortable. In which case, you can use a pillow or a cushion under each knee, which is
what I've got here. So this is your modification. So you can actually start with perhaps one leg
at a time just taking it down slowly, or you can do the exercises with both legs.
So I'll start with both knees modified to one leg only if you need to. So let's take a breath in,
and breathe out and remember we're breathing into our belly and breathe out and lower the
legs down slowly, and you might even need two pillows underneath your knees. Again, take
it to where it feels comfortable. Now, in this position, we're going to use our diaphragmatic
breath for our pelvic floor stretching as well as that inner thigh stretching that you can feel.
So breathing into the belly, you might like to like to place your hands down on your belly.
Feel your belly rise with the in-breath fill up,
and you might even feel the pelvic floor or visualize it starting to move downwards
with the in-breath, and then let it go. You could maybe even visit to visualize a balloon
expanding through your belly and through your pelvic floor with your in-breath.
For the next, we don't even need to change position which is very handy. Our next exercise
involves one or two knees to the chest. Now to take the pressure off your pelvic floor
when you move into this exercise, just move one leg at a time. So we're going to go one leg up,
and then the other leg up, and bring it all to bring your elbows around underneath your thighs
into this position. Now if this is too much of a stretch for you at the moment because it does
stretch the lower back and the bottom as well. You can just do one leg at a time and again just
take it slowly and again in this position, we're going to do our deep breathing or diaphragmatic
exercise to stretch our pelvic floor muscles and to help relax them. So in this position,
let's have our deep breath in, let's do a couple of deep breaths here, and let the air fall away,
and once again, breathing deeply into the belly, breathing in into your pelvic floor,
and let the air fall away, so you've just done one leg with that, you might like to repeat the
exercise with the other leg up. Otherwise, if you've got both legs up, the safe way to move
out of the stretch is one leg at a time, and the other leg, and again, just take a moment.
Now our final stretch is over on our hands and knees. So we're going to be changing position for
this particular exercise. So rolling over onto your side, which is the safe way to move with
pelvic pain and pelvic discomfort, and coming up over onto hands and knees into this position here.
Now, this is called a child's pose in yoga, we're going to modify it slightly. So, in this position,
we're going to be sliding backward, we have a breath in here and as we breathe out,
we'll slide backward but if this is uncomfortable for you, you can put a pillow behind your legs
like this behind your calves, just to lessen the degree of the stretch, and sit back into this
position. Now, again, you can come forward here, ideally, resting your forehead on your hands,
or if you needed to, you could use your other cushion underneath your head as well,
if you needed that extra support. Now in that position there, I'd like you to breathe again,
into your belly and into your pelvic floor. So take a nice deep breath in and allow the air to
then just fall away and you should be feeling just a gentle, perhaps bulging and softening
of the pelvic floor with your deep in-breath and then just relaxation with the out-breath.
And so now, we've just completed our exercises, I'd like you to finish
off again in your relaxation position. So coming back over and coming back into lying
down and just take a moment to do some of your diaphragmatic breaths, just to soften and relax
your pelvic floor to finish. So you're in that position there. Again, breathe into the belly
and relax and let go, and one more nice deep breath in, and relax, and let go.
So, at the start we talked about how many of these exercises to do, I would suggest that
you start doing them on alternate days and doing what feels comfortable for your body. The idea of
alternate days one day on one day off is to see how your body actually responds to the exercises.
Obviously, if you're uncomfortable the next day, you don't do them but if you feel fine, then you
might like to choose to start doing them every day, which is a really great practice. Now I'm
going to be advancing these or progressing these stretches in an upcoming video so you might like
to subscribe to catch that video too. As always, I always read your comments, so please feel welcome
to comment below. And, if you found the video helpful, I'd be really grateful if you could
give it a like below as well because then YouTube will share the video with other men and women that
might have pelvic pain and pelvic floor muscle spasm as well. So I'd like to thank you very much
for your time for watching today. As always look forward to seeing you next video. Goodbye for now.